Designed to translate Visual Studio C/C++ compiler options into something that Clang understands -- via gcc arguments, mostly -- while retaining and executing the rest of the MSBuild pipeline, including resource compilation and linker stages.

Simply load a project and choose Rebuild from the Clang menu.

If you’re lucky, you will end up with a functioning executable; if not, the plug-in verbosely spews the compiler output in a format compatible with the VS log window – double-click to jump to file locations, just as you would with the default compiler.

Using Clang you get the benefit of more descriptive and column-specific diagnostics, too. ClangVSx can dump the complete command line invocation, as well as the internal compiler-driver arguments.

Alongside the main menu additions, ClangVSx adds a context-menu to the editor that allows the developer to fire off Clang-specific tasks on the current source file.

It becomes trivial to bring up the LLVM bitcode representation of compiled source, or the output from the C/C++ preprocessor (a feature, I might add, that I wish Visual Studio had on the context menu itself, like CodeWarrior used to have)

Clang has ever-improving support for the Windows SDK but it's more than likely that complex projects will break. Certain headers in the platform SDK trigger huge error sequences.

However, if nothing else, you can use ClangVSX as a quick way to try out C++11/14 features that recent Clang releases have that Visual Studio still does not...

The ClangVSx source code is available on GitHub. Release notes and version information (ie. what works and what probably doesn’t) can also be found there.